Land of the Blind

by Barbara Nadel

Genres: Mystery; International Crime & Mystery; Police Procedurals

Synopsis

A body is found in the ruined Constantinople hippodrome: a woman, clutching a piece of red stone. She's recently given birth, but there's no sign of the baby. Inspector Cetin Ikmen discovers she was a Byzantine specialist on a crusade to protect the historic but now squalid areas of Istanbul that her enemy, property developer Ahmet Oden, seeks to destroy and rebuild. As Ikmen searches for the lost child and the truth behind her death, the people of Istanbul rise up in protest against their government in Gezi Park, and the city lurches into chaos and anger. Against this background, Ikmen will unravel a tale of ancient hostility and modern desires, where the truth is concealed within the secret history of this antique city.

Release date: January 1, 2015

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 384

Sample

 

 

 

He could only stand. A slight bend of the knees was all he could do and if he leaned forward his head touched the wall. Just out of reach, on the dirt floor, was a candle. It was wide and tall and if he put his left leg too near it his trousers began to crackle. His chest felt as if it was enclosed in the coils of a snake. The air, stale and thick with dust, irritated his lungs, forcing him to breathe consciously against the pollutants as well as the embrace of the imaginary serpent. On a ledge, just beside his left arm, was a tall jug of water. Within his reach, it must have been put there for him and at first he appreciated it. His mouth was dry and the first sip tasted delicious. The second, bitter.

He forced himself to put the jug down. Why was the jug there, really? And what did it contain? If it was poison and he died, did it count as suicide if he hadn’t put it in the water himself? And if it was clean why had it been left there? To prolong his torment? To make him eke it out like a common prisoner? There was nowhere for him to pee except on the floor. He’d have to concentrate to get his arms down to unzip his fly. It wouldn’t be easy. He wanted to weep. But men didn’t.

‘Who is there?’ he called out. ‘Is anyone there?’

He hadn’t expected an answer and he didn’t get one.

The water shone in the candlelight. Entirely clear and pure. How could it be poisoned? Did he feel unwell? How could he tell? He was in a cavity about two metres tall by two metres long, the width he could only guess. Was it one metre or less? It meant he couldn’t sit unless he almost folded himself in half, or lay. When he thought about it, he could only just breathe. His heart began to pick up its beat and he prayed. Not properly because he couldn’t prostrate himself. Would God listen? Of course He would! Where had that thought come from? He always listened and provided.

Except maybe now? The thought had insinuated itself into his head almost before he’d noticed. Sin could be so easily fallen into. And he had just plummeted. Now he began to cry. There was fear. Doubt was a terrible sin and to sin meant that when death came he would not walk in the gardens of Paradise. He begged and begged for forgiveness, his voice slicing the silence, the power of his words causing the candle flame to gutter and twist. Afraid he’d blow it out by accident, he stopped. The flame became stable again and he prayed in his head.

God was listening and He did care. All his life he’d done exactly what those more educated in the words of the Koran had told him. Not one request had he ever denied. Bar that moment of doubt, his soul was pure. His mind said, And your body?

A noise came out of his mouth. Like a squeal. Then he began to shake. ‘Oh, God,’ he said. ‘Oh God!’

Hearing his own voice tremble was not a comfortable thing. He begged. ‘Please, please help me. I’ll never do it again. Never.’

And he waited and he waited. But no help came. He wanted and didn’t want water and the candle flame guttered again in time to his sobs. Still no relief came, no rest from the reality that he had been buried alive. Which he had been.

‘My cousin and my son are in there somewhere,’ Çetin İkmen said as he finished his glass of beer and called for another.

He and Mehmet Süleyman had a good view of İstanbul’s Gay Pride march from their vantage point outside a small cafe on Zambak Sokak.

‘I’m just glad it seems to be going off without incident,’ Süleyman said. ‘Given recent events. How is Fatma Hanım about Kemal’s, er, sexuality?’

‘Entirely ignorant,’ İkmen said. The waiter brought his beer and he took a sip. ‘Which is best for all concerned.’

‘Ah, but Çetin, secrets fester.’

‘You refer to the Negropontes,’ he said. ‘I wonder who Yiannis Negroponte really was?’

‘Well, no relation to Madam Anastasia, that’s for sure.’

‘I wonder how he found out about the family? And where the real Yiannis Negroponte is? Or even if he survived the events of 1955?’

‘Who knows? But the fake Yiannis was a magician, remember.’ Süleyman smiled. ‘Those people know things.’

‘They do.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘You must be pleased to know who your body in the garden of the Lise is.’

‘I am. But who is in Nikos Negroponte’s grave at the moment, eh?’

‘A homeless person? An unfortunate tourist?’

A group of boys dressed in rainbow coloured tutus ran into Zambak Sokak and performed a small spontaneous ballet. Everyone eating and drinking outside clapped.

‘We still don’t know who killed Ariadne Savva or where her baby is,’ İkmen said. ‘That Greek tragedy continues. That makes me sad. You know, Professor Bozdağ now thinks that the skeleton she thought was the last Byzantine emperor is actually too modern. The sword, on the other hand . . .’

‘Could be genuine.’

‘Could be. But he’s just happy to have the Red Room all to himself.’

‘Is Madam Negroponte all right with that?’

‘Now she’s got Lokman and his family looking after her, she’s happy for the archaeologists to have their fun. She’s changed her will to leave it all to Lokman, you know.’

‘Well, he is family, I suppose. Do you think the Red Room will ever be opened to the public?’

İkmen shrugged. ‘If Aya Sofya becomes a mosque again, probably not,’ he said. ‘But what do I know? It’s easy to judge conservative people and put them all in the same box with those who believe in djinn, celestial virgins and holy death. But look at Semih Öden – just made peace with Madam Negroponte, said he’d leave her alone, even wished her well.’

‘I wonder if his brother killed Ariadne Savva?’

‘I wish I knew,’ İkmen said. ‘Maybe it would give her family some peace. I think that Ahmet had more contact with Ariadne than he said. I think she may have tried to barter the body of Palaiologos for homes for the Gizlitepe rubbish pickers. If he didn’t send those threatening letters to the forensic lab, I can’t think who did. I mean, she can’t have really believed that a Byzantine prince still lived in this city, can she? But I do wonder where her porphyry room was. Red. If it wasn’t the Red Room, underneath the Negropontes’ house, then where the hell was it?’

The little girl gurgled when she saw the old lady. Madam Anastasia gently stroked her face.

Lokman took the baby from her old, purple hands. ‘Come on, little Zoe,’ he said. ‘Time to leave Grandmama to rest.’

‘She . . . so . . .’

The old woman’s eyes moistened. ‘She has Yiannis Bey’s mouth,’ Lokman said. ‘And his eyes.’

‘Yes, but his m-m-m . . .’

‘Sssh! Sssh!’ Lokman rocked the baby on his knee. ‘Madam, Dr Ariadne didn’t suffer, honestly! Dad said that when she’d had the baby she got up too quickly. She fell down and hit her head on the edge of the birthing platform. It was an accident. It was stupid not just to get the police then but—’

‘Centuries of . . . secrets . . .’

‘Yes.’

The baby gurgled.

‘And another one here,’ Lokman said. ‘Daughter of a Negroponte, born to the Purple.’

‘With royal blood . . .’ The old woman smiled.

‘Through her mother. Yes,’ Lokman said. ‘The first Byzantine princess born to the Purple for over five hundred years.’

‘And she will . . . she will rule again,’ Madam Anastasia Negroponte said with pride.

But Lokman just smiled. Then he took Yiannis Negroponte and Ariadne Savva’s baby back to his wife.

‘Porphyry,’ Çetin İkmen said.

‘What?’ His colleague, a rotund Armenian pathologist, continued to look into the deceased’s eyes.

‘The piece of stone in her left hand,’ İkmen said. ‘It’s porphyry.’

‘Is it.’ The pathologist, Dr Arto Sarkissian, looked at İkmen. ‘Forgive me, I’m rather more concerned that this woman has not long given birth. I can’t get excited about stone.’

‘There’s no porphyry in here,’ İkmen said. To prove his point he flashed the light from his torch around the darkened space. He’d never been there before. Although less than five minutes from his apartment, the sphendone or curved back edge of İstanbul’s Hippodrome was unknown to him. Or rather the interior of the ancient monument was. Thousands of tourists explored what remained of the Byzantine structure above ground every day, but Inspector Çetin İkmen and his friend and colleague Arto Sarkissian were underground. In what remained of a ruined gallery they were where the charioteers used to robe before the Games commenced and where wild animals – lions, tigers and bears – would wait their turn to fight each other to the death for the entertainment of the baying crowd in the arena. It was a place already soaked in blood. Now it was absorbing some more.

‘There’s trauma to the back of the head,’ Arto said.

‘Was that why she died?’

‘I don’t know. Won’t know until I can examine her properly.’

It was impossible to stand up straight in that place. Earthquakes plus thousands of years had transformed what had been a double galleried Roman hippodrome into a crumbling, squashed wreck. The doctor could see that the woman was dead and even the non-medically trained police inspector could work out that the blood between her legs together with the severed umbilical cord meant that she’d given birth not long before. But beyond those facts, investigation became difficult.

İkmen looked around again. When he’d first seen the woman and realised she’d just had a baby he’d run, hunched up against the sagging galleries above, looking for it. But he’d soon come up against spaces so small not even he could squeeze through them. He’d also feared he’d get lost.

When he’d spoken to the two young men who had found the body – ‘urban explorers’ they’d called themselves – they’d told him they hadn’t seen or even heard any baby.

Bilal, the smaller of the two, had said, ‘We opened the door and there she was. Alone. We called you immediately.’

His friend, a lanky youngster in tight Lycra, said nothing.

Bilal had told İkmen that they’d got permission to go underneath the Hippodrome from the local authority, Fatih, as well as from the holders of the key to the monument, the Archaeological Museum. And to İkmen’s surprise there had only been one key required to open the small green door that led into the back of the ancient site. Heavy and clearly old, the urban explorers’ key looked like something that might unlock a castle. It was also identical to a key the dead woman held in her right hand.

‘It’s possible she’s only been dead for an hour,’ Arto said. ‘There’s no sign of rigor. Mind you, it’s hot in here.’

In spite of it being five o’clock in the morning, the city of İstanbul and especially the cramped cavities underneath the Hippodrome sweated in the heat. When summer arrived in the great metropolis on the Bosphorus it really made an impact.

A photographer, a man even portlier than the doctor, came through the small green door and looked at Sarkissian expectantly. Clearly he didn’t want to have to squash his considerable stomach by bending for too long. The Armenian said, ‘I want all the usual shots, Ali. Pay special attention to the head and the sexual organs.’

‘Yes, Doctor.’

Çetin İkmen had to get out. He couldn’t breathe and he was beginning to feel nauseous. Outside, a gaggle of uniformed officers stood with the awkward looking urban explorers. One of the constables offered İkmen a cigarette which he took and lit up.

‘Thank you, Yıldız,’ he said.

Constable Yıldız, a slim man in his mid-thirties, mumbled that it was nothing.

The sun, coming up over the Asian side of the city, sent a ray directly into İkmen’s face and he winced. Bastard! Not only had he been wrenched from his bed by death, now the sun had it in for him too. If he’d had four hours sleep before his mobile phone had clattered in his ear at four fifteen, he’d been lucky. And now he had a missing baby to worry about too. Had the child died with its mother or had someone taken the baby away? Arto said the woman had a head wound. Had someone hit her deliberately with child stealing in mind? And who had cut the woman’s umbilical cord? There had been no sign of a knife or scissors. There’d been no ID either. Women usually carried handbags, but this one hadn’t. Then again, she had been giving birth. But she’d done that wearing what had looked to İkmen like an ordinary summer dress.

‘God help me, I can’t stay in there any longer,’ Arto Sarkissian said. Getting out through the tiny green door had been a challenge and the Armenian’s face was red from exertion.

İkmen told one of his uniformed officers to share his bottle of water with the doctor.

‘Thank you.’ Arto Sarkissian shook his head. ‘What on earth was she doing giving birth in a place like that?’

İkmen shrugged. ‘How old do you reckon she was?’

‘Mid to late thirties.’ The doctor drank some more water and then splashed a handful over his face. ‘From her general condition and her clothes I’d say she was urban, educated, secular. This is no little country girl raped by her uncle. Which makes one wonder why she gave birth in a place like that.’

‘She had a key,’ İkmen said.

‘She did.’

İkmen tipped his head at the two urban explorers. ‘They got theirs from the Archaeological Museum. They hold some and so do the Municipality.’

‘So it’s fusty archaeologists and slimy local government officials for you then,’ Arto said.

‘Seems like it.’

İkmen always looked disappointed even when he wasn’t, and dealing with government either national or local always made him depressed. Politicians were evasive, even when they didn’t need to be. It was a habit they all got into as soon as they attained office. Maybe it was mandatory.

‘I’ll determine cause of death and hopefully a more precise time as soon as I can,’ Arto said.

İkmen nodded.

A van arrived containing five white-clad individuals. The forensic team would investigate the corpse and the site and take samples before the doctor would be able to take the dead woman to his laboratory. He walked over to liaise with the team leader leaving İkmen alone with his thoughts. It was always reassuring to work with his friend Arto Sarkissian. They’d known each other all their lives and each trusted the other completely. But if this woman’s death was a murder then someone was missing from İkmen’s team and he felt that lack like a knife to the soul. He looked up into the sky and wondered whether the religious people had something when they talked about souls and Paradise. And against every secular atom in his body he hoped that they had something because he didn’t want Ayşe Farsakoğlu to be nowhere.

Commissioner Hürrem Teker knew what they called her. She’d known the name they’d given her when she worked in Antep. The policemen of İstanbul were no less subtle. Whereas in Antep she’d been The Stormtrooper, in the city on the Bosphorus they called her The Iron Virgin. If only they knew.

Hürrem looked at the report of a suspicious death in Sultanahmet. A woman’s body had been discovered inside the back of the Hippodrome. She didn’t know it even had an inside. Çetin İkmen, one of her older and more interesting officers, was at the scene. Him, she liked. Life-scarred, cynical and given to some of the bad habits and addictions she had, İkmen was also, according to her predecessor, Ardıç, the most trustworthy police inspector in İstanbul.

There was a knock on her door. However, this man she was about to see was another matter. ‘Come.’

Inspector Mehmet Süleyman was a handsome man in his early forties. An immaculate dresser, he belonged to one of those old Ottoman families distantly related to the Sultans. Consequently he had the kind of naturally arrogant allure that a lot of women, Hürrem included, found very attractive. But he wasn’t always to be trusted. Commissioner Ardıç had told her so but Hürrem also knew it by instinct. Handsome men had always been her weakness, in the past, and they had consistently let her down.

The door opened.

Hürrem smiled at him. ‘Sit down, Süleyman.’ She pointed to a chair in front of her desk. She preferred using surnames as people did in the West rather than using the Ottoman appellation, ‘bey’. She considered it an anachronism in the twenty-first century; she also felt that if she called a man like this ‘Mehmet Bey’ she was colluding with the view some had of him as an ‘Ottoman gentleman’. The last thing Hürrem wanted to encourage in her officers was any sort of hierarchy that was not police-related.

Süleyman sat down.

Hürrem got straight to the point. Süleyman might not be entirely trustworthy, but he didn’t deserve the rebuke she was about to deliver. So he fucked some gypsy women? So what. That wasn’t her business. But there were some, both inferior and superior to Hürrem, who felt that it was very much their concern. A few were people she couldn’t ignore. ‘I’ve called you in because I’ve had complaints,’ she said.

‘About me?’

‘Yes. Although I should hasten to add these complaints are not about your work. They concern the company you keep, namely a gypsy woman you visit in Balat.’

‘Oh.’ He looked crushed.

Hürrem hated herself. What this man did in bed was his affair. Except that in some people’s eyes – those she called the ‘Morality Police’ – his life was not his own, but needed to be lived according to their standards. And there were a lot of people like them.

‘Be discreet,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to lecture you about your personal life, especially in view of the tragedy that befell this department only a few months ago.’

İkmen’s sergeant, Ayşe Farsakoğlu, had been shot and killed in the line of duty and many of her colleagues still felt her loss keenly. Principal amongst those who suffered was Çetin İkmen, who had been her immediate superior, and Mehmet Süleyman, who at one time had been her lover.

‘Personally I don’t care who you associate with provided they don’t have a criminal record,’ Hürrem continued. ‘But you know as well as I just how influential those of a highly moralistic tenor are in our society right now, and I don’t want you to get caught out by them. The bottom line is that I don’t want to lose a good officer. I don’t think I have to tell you that such people can affect careers and lives, and there’s not a lot someone like me can do about it.’

The current government and some of their allies were religiously inspired in their opinions. Their resultant moral standards, particularly when it came to sex, were high. More and more of them had entered the police in recent years.

‘I see.’ Now he looked defiant – and arrogant, and very attractive.

Hürrem cleared her throat. ‘I’m not going to say you must stop seeing this woman, Gonca Şekeroğlu,’ she said. ‘I’m not saying that you should marry her. Who knows what those of a moralistic nature would make of a gypsy as a policeman’s wife. But leave your car somewhere other than outside her house. I know where she lives is up a monstrous hill that I wouldn’t want to climb. You smoke, I smoke; I know the problem. But your last medical showed you to be fit. Walk there.’

Now he put his head down. ‘Yes, madam.’

‘And when you arrive it would be better if this woman’s vast tribe of children and grandchildren didn’t spill out on to the streets to see what sweets you’ve brought for them.’ She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Süleyman, truly . . .’

‘I know these words are not yours, madam,’ he said.

‘In instances like this I have to act on the words of others,’ she said. ‘And I’m sorry.’ Then she smiled. ‘Discreet. Yes?’

After a moment he smiled too. ‘Discreet. Absolutely.’

‘Thank you.’

After he left she berated herself for giving in to pressure and telling Süleyman he had to be more careful, but also congratulated herself on a job well done. She hadn’t forbidden him from seeing Turkey’s most famous gypsy artist, Gonca Şekeroğlu, which was what she was supposed to have done. Hopefully she’d made him behave as if he was being watched by an enemy, which he was.

Everything about the ‘Morality Police’ stuck in Hürrem’s craw. Her father and grandfather had been professional soldiers who passionately believed in Ataturk’s secular republic. They would have been horrified at her interference in Süleyman’s personal life. Admittedly, they would also have been horrified by the amount of power the military had taken for themselves prior to the coming of the Islamically based AKP government. The army’s rigidity and cruelty had helped to bring the AKP into power just as surely as the party’s promise to break the military’s iron grip on the country. But even in her wildest imaginings, Hürrem had never considered the kind of moral bullying she and many others were being subjected to.

She opened her office window, stuck her head out into the torrid İstanbul air and lit a cigarette. In a moment of rebellion, she hoped that some ‘morality policeman’ in the street below saw her. After all, she could get away with the cigarette by arguing that her head was outside the building. What she would be able to say should either of her two latest lovers be identified, she really didn’t know.

If Kerim Gürsel had been a young man, İkmen would have expected him to bound across open ground like a gazelle. But he was in his early forties, which made his rapid gambol look a little awkward.

‘Don’t know where the fire is, Sergeant Gürsel,’ İkmen said as his deputy approached.

Gürsel, whose face was slim and dark and forever mildly amused, said, ‘We’ve got a murder, sir. Can’t afford to waste time.’

‘No, but I’m not sure that Professor Bozdağ will share your enthusiasm. When he gets here,’ İkmen said.

He’d been sitting outside Dr Sarkissian’s pathology laboratory for over an hour. For the past ten minutes he’d been waiting for this Professor Bozdağ. When he’d first stepped out of the Armenian’s lab he’d done so to smoke and also to get away from the inevitable smell of blood and preserving fluid that pervaded the building. He’d found out what he needed to know, which was that the woman from the Hippodrome had been killed by a blow to the back of the head. She had possibly fallen, although some of the indentations in her skull seemed to suggest that she could also have been hit with an instrument of some sort. Then he’d got a call from the station about this Professor Bozdağ.

‘If he’s an archaeologist a dead body won’t upset him,’ Kerim Gürsel said. ‘They deal with them all the time.’

‘When they’re thousands of years old, yes,’ İkmen said. ‘I doubt very much whether Professor Bozdağ has seen many fresh corpses.’

‘He offered to come.’

‘Because one of his colleagues has gone missing,’ İkmen said.

Kerim continued to smile, which was annoying. He did a few things that wound İkmen up. He made puerile jokes sometimes, did far too much running and didn’t smoke. But he was a good soul who talked about his wife, whom he seemed to adore, and he liked animals, which was a plus in İkmen’s book. His main fault was that he wasn’t Ayşe Farsakoğlu. He, poor man, had been given the impossible task of replacing a dead officer most people had liked and everyone had trusted. Luckily he was an İstanbullu, which was a plus in most people’s eyes, but he still wasn’t Ayşe and he never would be.

A yellow taxi with a pair of Türkcell bug antennae on the roof stopped in front of the laboratory and an elderly, grey-haired man got out.

‘Inspector İkmen?’

İkmen threw his latest cigarette butt to one side and stood up.

‘Yes.’

The man paid the driver and then walked up the steps towards the police officers. ‘God but it’s hot!’ He put a hand out. ‘Ramazan Bozdağ,’ he said.

İkmen shook his hand and then introduced Sergeant Gürsel.

‘I’m really hoping that this visit is going to be a waste of time, from my point of view,’ the professor said. ‘When our Dr Savva didn’t arrive for work this morning, I thought she might just be late. But then when Meltem Hanım came to me and said she’d not seen Dr Savva return to her apartment last night I became concerned. I tried to ring her but she didn’t pick up. And then of course I heard the news about the woman inside the sphendone.’

‘The back of the Hippodrome.’

‘Yes. Dr Savva is a specialist in Byzantine art, she has a key to the structure.’

İkmen looked meaningfully at Gürsel. Then he said, ‘Let me take you through, Professor Bozdağ.’

The older man wiped his brow. ‘I imagine it will at least be cool in there . . .’

When Arto Sarkissian exposed the dead woman’s face, the professor didn’t look shocked or horrified, just sad.

‘Oh God, what has happened here?’ he said.

İkmen could see that Kerim Gürsel was champing at the bit to know whether the body was the professor’s colleague or not, so he put a calming hand on his shoulder. Moments that felt like minutes passed.

Professor Bozdağ took in a deep breath. ‘It’s her, gentlemen. My colleague, Dr Ariadne Savva. She was a Greek national, so you’ll have to inform the consulate.’ Then he leaned forwards to get closer to her. ‘Oh Ariadne, what on earth has happened to you?’

They let him have a few moments with her and then Arto Sarkissian said, ‘Professor, when we found Dr Savva she had just given birth to a child.’

The archaeologist straightened up. ‘A child? In the sphendone?’

‘Did you not know she was pregnant?’

All the colour disappeared from his face. İkmen, afraid that the professor might be about to faint, got him a chair. As he sat down Bozdağ said, ‘No.’

A lot of men, especially older ones, could be notoriously unobservant when it came to what women looked like and what they wore. İkmen always relied on his daughters to tell him when his wife had a new dress or a manicure.

‘Was she married?’ İkmen asked. ‘Or did she have a partner?’

‘No,’ the professor said, ‘to both. Ariadne was married to her job. She had friends, at the museum, and she was involved in some sort of voluntary social work . . .’

‘Do you know what?’

Arto Sarkissian covered the body’s face and wheeled it out of the viewing room.

‘No,’ Bozdağ said. ‘But I believe she got some of her colleagues at the museum involved. I assume you’ll want to interview everyone . . .’

‘Yes.’

There was silence for a while. The professor began to shiver, and when Arto Sarkissian returned he got him a blanket which he draped around his shoulders.

The archaeologist thanked him and then said, ‘What about Ariadne’s child? What is it? A boy or a girl?’

‘We don’t know,’ İkmen said. ‘When we found her the baby had gone.’

‘Gone where?’

‘We don’t know. We’ve been searching the immediate vicinity ever since we found the body of the mother. Now we know who she was we’ll search her apartment. Commissioner Teker is giving a press conference this afternoon where she’ll appeal for information.’

‘What was Dr Savva doing having a child in the sphendone?’ He looked up at İkmen. ‘It’s filthy in there. And dark. Did she have a light with her?’

‘No. No handbag, no light, just the key to the monument.’ İkmen kept the other detail, the porphyry stone, to himself. Holding back certain pieces of information about a crime scene often proved useful when suspects began to emerge.

‘The museum will do whatever we can to assist your investigation, Inspector İkmen,’ the professor said. ‘Especially with a baby out there somewhere. Do you think that maybe its father took it?’

‘It’s possible. But if he did,’ İkmen said, ‘he also, possibly, killed Dr Savva first. Because it’s very possible she was murdered, Professor Bozdağ. I think she gave birth and then either she fell, was pushed or someone smashed her skull in. And that someone could have her baby.’

The old archaeologist closed his eyes and shook his head.

He finished for the day at one and headed straight for Gonca’s house, but he left his car right down by the Golden Horn. Then it was hill climbing and crumbling staircases all the way up to where she lived, which was behind the Greek School. Technically Gonca and her vast family lived in the old Greek quarter of Fener but it was on the border with Balat, which was its postal address.

The climb in the fierce afternoon heat was tough. But Mehmet Süleyman was determined to do what he wanted in spite of what unnamed moralisers in the department might think. Ever since Ayşe had been killed he’d found he needed Gonca even more. Not just for sex, although that was part of it, but because he could talk to her about how he felt. Gonca was way too old and way too wise to be threatened by the spectre of a dead woman.

When he arrived all the kids were out and she was alone, painting in her studio. When she saw him sweating and panting in her doorway she smiled. ‘You’re eager,’ she said.

‘Yes – and no,’ he said. He sat down and told her what Commissioner Teker had spoken to him about. He also pointed to his car, which was a tiny white dot beside the water. She got him a large glass of water.

When he’d finished she said, ‘Bastards! What